Affectionately retracing Turgenev's life journeys

Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev
By Robert Dessaix
Shoemaker & Hoard, 275 pp., $24

Of the great 19th-century Russian novelists, Ivan Turgenev (1818-83) was the least rooted to the home soil, the most at ease conversing in European drawing rooms. His loyalties were to ''civilisation," he avowed, not to a ''certain piece of land traced out on a map." Stung by the hostility greeting his novel ''Fathers and Sons" in Russia in 1862, Turgenev spent most of his remaining years in Germany and France.

In ''Twilight of Love," Robert Dessaix, an Australian literature scholar, portrays his experiences in retracing Turgenev's journeys. Although Dessaix lovingly evokes a stroll through Paris or looks skeptically at the new Moscow, his book is not a travelogue; indeed, he acknowledges that sightseeing can be mind-numbing. And though he explores Turgenev's characters and themes, it is not a work of literary criticism.

Dessaix seeks to confront timeless concerns -- love, aging, mortality -- through the prism of Turgenev's life and writings. Fueling his travels is his fascination with Turgenev's attachment to the French opera singer Pauline Viardot. It was a love, Dessaix contends, that belongs to an earlier age, one he believes is hard to capture in words that speak to us today. Still, he searches for the essence of what Turgenev felt.

Living in an increasingly scientific, materialistic age -- a time when the soul ''was put on notice," Dessaix says -- Turgenev wondered whether love still mattered. Was the physical world all that there was? Were only those things that could be touched or seen real? His protagonists reflect his uncertainties: Bazarov, the nihilist hero of ''Fathers and Sons," disdains ideals; Nezhdanov, the revolutionary in ''Virgin Soil," loses belief in the slogans he chants and broods on the finality of death, the futility of all endeavor.

Defying logic, Turgenev held to love as the last hope in the battle against time, decay, pointlessness. Viardot was married, and the relationship was probably unconsummated. Yet for 40 years, Turgenev's devotion never wavered; she was, Dessaix writes, ''the very pivot of his being." He built or took homes nearby the Viardot household. Dessaix pictures him as troubadour to her lady. Although, sadly, that ideal of courtly love ultimately conflicted with Turgenev's longing for a ''nest," Dessaix nevertheless views the relationship as ''enriching," a way of creating ''happiness of a kind."

Probing Turgenev's world, Dessaix is pensive and witty, never heavy-handed, posing conundrums, taking pleasure in words and ideas. His affection for Turgenev is contagious, though he notes it developed slowly. In youth, he preferred a Tolstoy or Dostoevski ''symphony" to a Turgenev ''sonata"; as an older reader, Dessaix takes a quiet pleasure in Turgenev's graceful language, his understanding of human emotions, his ''large-heartedness."

Turgenev's dilemma persists today, in Dessaix's view. In suggesting, however, that Turgenev's idea of transcendent love is ''foreign" to us, something that in our own era we can scarcely imagine or desire, perhaps he overreaches. Are we really prisoners of our culture's coarseness and excess? But while Dessaix's view of love in twilight may be overly pessimistic, he still proves congenial, stimulating company, much like the writer to whom he pays tribute.